China takes steps to clean up 'cancer villages'

The Chinese government has acknowledged the existence of "cancer villages": areas where rates of cancer are unusually high, probably because of industrial and agricultural contamination of drinking and irrigation water.

The reference to the cancer clusters was in China's first ever five-year plan for environmental management of chemicals, released on 20 February. The Chinese media, translating parts of the report, said it links water pollution to "serious cases of health and social problems like the emergence of cancer villages in individual regions".

But proving a link between pollution and cancer requires more detailed evidence, says Tim Driscoll, an epidemiologist at the University of Sydney and science adviser to Cancer Council Australia. However, Driscoll also says it doesn't really matter – if there is dangerous pollution anywhere, it should be cleaned up.

And that is the plan. China's Ministry for Environmental Protection has drawn up a list of 58 chemicals that will be tracked with a registry, including known and suspected carcinogens and endocrine disrupters. Before the end of the 2015, they will subdivide the list into chemicals to be eliminated and those to be reduced.

Big shift

Creating a plan to eliminate some chemicals is a big shift, says Yixiu Wu, a Greenpeace East Asia campaigner based in Beijing, who says even committing to controlling these chemicals would have been a step forward.

The ministry's acknowledgement of the problem is "really important and it is another reflection of the government's shift towards more transparency in pollution information," says Sabrina Orlins from the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a non-profit body in Beijing.

"Increased environmental information leads to increased public awareness where people can have the chance to exert pressure on big water polluters to adopt clean-up measures and be more accountable," she says.

That accountability is where the five-year plan is lacking, says Wu. "It is still a question whether the government is willing to release all the information about the factory locations and their environmental risk," she says. "It is very important for people who are living nearby."

Wu says the motivation to develop the plan comes from an increasing awareness of the human cost of pollution as well as the country signing up to several international conventions designed to curb pollution.

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China is starting to clean up its environment, but accountability remains an issue (Image: Reuters)